© Publishing House “Hummingbird”
The novel “Atlantic Express” by Georgi Tenev stands out for its imaginative portrayal of the apocalypse.
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The review was republished by “Literaturen Vestnik”.
“Atlantic Express” by Georgi Tenev
“Hummingbirds”, 2022
Written over six years and as if waiting for the right historical moment, when the geopolitical reality seems too dynamic, “Atlantic Express” is the new novel by Georgi Tenev. With it, the writer continues the line of futuristic pessimism, also present in Tenev’s previous dystopian novel – “The Residence”.
And if with “Residence”, albeit in a fantastic genre, Tenev still explores the familiar subject matter – the corruption of power and the mechanisms of totalitarianism, while still in a national context, now he is not limited to Bulgaria, but talks about universal and well-known to science fiction fears about the development of the human race.
“Atlantic Express” is the new novel by Georgi Tenev
The express of the title is a train departing from Thessaloniki and proceeding on a viaduct across the ocean to an unspecified terminus. People fleeing from the Old Continent gather there, among them one of the two main characters of the novel – Rado. He is a former reporter and correspondent who will take on the role of living human memory. Through his memories and the brief interviews he begins to take of the train passengers, much of the world-building in the narrative takes place. The reader is quickly presented with a catalog of disasters that have befallen the Old Continent.
To mention them all would be too difficult, but some of them include the grounding of all airplanes in Europe forever due to Chinese drones, an event marked in the book by the acronym DSCNL (“The Day We Don’t Fly”); numerous Arab troops waiting to invade European countries, and the even greater threat of a newly emerging caliphate on Russian soil; the rise of the waters of the World Ocean (leading to the gradual sinking of the continents) and perhaps the most original disaster – the spreading sect and belief in a reincarnated Adolf Hitler. None of the disasters that tear the world apart are particularly detailed. None of them have an important plot role in themselves, but together they stimulate the feeling of hopelessness and hopelessness before the human race.
However, the book also has a non-dystopian side. Parallel to Rado’s story, somewhere far away in time and space, Sha, artificially created and raised to captain a colonization ship, discovers a male corpse on board. This provided that she must be the only passenger alive. Her story separates us dramatically from what’s happening on Earth and is more aptly described as a sci-fi mystery or even a crime mystery. Sha often turns to the journals of another captain whose ship has disappeared without a trace in a space-time phenomenon called the Heat Triangle, and whose story is yet another mystery that the novel will slowly unravel.
All this, the end of human civilization on Earth and Sha chasing the truth on her ship, seems like material for a massive novel, when in fact “Atlantic Express” is only 211 pages. The speech is economical, but at the same time very heavy due to its saturation with terminology, abbreviations and neologisms. The perception of the book is additionally complicated by Tenev’s characteristic handling of time and space in the narrative, as well as the unclear (not to say non-existent) cause-and-effect relationships between some of the events in the last parts of the book. The very end of the novel, when Sha finds an intelligent rabbit where the reactor of her ship should be, leaves a particularly strong impression in this regard.
Apart from being an Alice in Wonderland reference, this rabbit takes on an expositional role and explains the hidden meaning behind the events that have happened so far, or at least that seems to be the intention. But the reader can easily feel lost in his otherwise long several-page monologues. “Not everything can be analyzed,” he tells Sha, and this seems to be a kind of interpretive key that Tenev gives his readers.
What future does this novel actually reveal to us? He seems to want to be categorical in his pessimism about humanity; if all the crises described in the novel happen, it will perish. An anti-tuopia in “Atlantic Express” can only be spoken of in the first half of the book, while in the second, when the separate storylines and times begin to be detected, it seems that there are no longer living people, let alone social systems (albeit with a negative sign, they are necessary to the dystopian genre).
There are other creatures: thinking machines, Sha (the closest thing to a human), the three-eyed bears on the cover, the enigmatic rabbit. After the end of the human world, the memories of it can only be carried by post-humans, some hybrid form between human and non-human, like the baby that will grow in Sha’s womb after her acquaintance with the various biological metamorphoses until the end of the book Rado. It turns out that the only way the self-destructive human species can leave a legacy is by evolving into another life form, perhaps wiser, at any rate post-human.
“Atlantic Express” is a difficult book that requires a solid dose of concentration even in its modest volume. But if the reader can overcome some difficulties in following the plot, he can derive quite a bit of intellectual delight. In addition, the novel stands out with a scope of imagination in the portrayal of the apocalypse and in a strong ambition for serious science fiction, which should attract admirers of this type of literature in Bulgaria.
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